In order to develop and articulate his philosophical system, Dewey first needed to expose what he regarded as the flaws of the existing tradition. He believed that the distinguishing feature of Western philosophy was its assumption that true being—that which is fully real or fully knowable—is changeless, perfect, and eternal and the source of whatever reality the world of experience may possess. Plato’s forms (abstract entities corresponding to the properties of particular things) and the Christianconception of God were two examples of such a static, pure, and transcendent being, compared with which anything that undergoes change is imperfect and less real. According to one modern version of the assumption, developed by the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes, all experience is subjective, an exclusively mental phenomenon that cannot provide evidence of the existence or the nature of the physical world, the “matter” of which is ultimately nothing more than changeless extension in motion. The Western tradition thus made a radical distinction between true reality on the one hand and the endless varieties and variations of worldly human experience on the other.

Dewey held that this philosophy of nature was drastically impoverished. Rejecting any dualism between being and experience, he proposed that all things are subject to change and do change. There is no static being, and there is no changeless nature. Nor is experience purely subjective, because the human mind is itself part and parcel of nature. Human experiences are the outcomes of a range of interacting processes and are thus worldly events. The challenge to human life, therefore, is to determine how to live well with processes of change, not somehow to transcend them.

Nature and the construction of ends

Dewey developed a metaphysics that examined characteristics of nature that encompassed human experience but were either ignored by or misrepresented by more traditional philosophers. Three such characteristics—what he called the “precarious,” “histories,” and “ends”—were central to his philosophical project.

The precarious

For Dewey, a precarious event is one that somehow makes ongoing experience problematic; thus, any obstacle, disruption, danger, or surprise of any kind is precarious. As noted earlier, because humanity is a part of nature, all things that humans encounter in their daily experience, including other humans and the social institutions they inhabit, are natural events. The arbitrary cruelty of a tyrant or the kindness shown by a stranger is as natural and precarious as the destruction wrought by a flood or the vibrant colours of a sunset. Human ideas and moral norms must also be viewed in this way. Human knowledge is wholly intertwined with precarious, constantly changing nature.

The constancy of change does not imply a complete lack of continuity with the past stages of natural processes. What Dewey meant by a history was a process of change with an identifiable outcome. When the constituent processes of a history are identified, they become subject to modification, and their outcome can be deliberately varied and secured. Dewey’s conception of a history has an obvious implication for humanity: no person’s fate is sealed by an antecedently given human nature, temperament, character, talent, or social role. This is why Dewey was so concerned with developing a philosophy of education. With an appropriate knowledge of the conditions necessary for human growth, an individual may develop in any of a variety of ways. The object of education is thus to promote the fruition of an active history of a specific kind—a human history.

Ends and goods

Since at least the time of Aristotle (384–322 bce), many Western philosophers have made use of the notion of end, or final cause—i.e., a cause conceived of as a natural purpose or goal (seeteleology). In ethics, ends are the natural or consciously determined goals of moral actions; they are moral absolutes, such as happiness or “the good,” that human actions are designed to bring about. But such ends must be discerned before they can be fully attained. For Dewey, on the other hand, an end is a deliberately constructed outcome of a history. Hence, his expression “the construction of good” encapsulates much of the significance of his philosophy. A person confronted by a spontaneous intrusion of the precarious world into the seemingly steady course of his life will identify and analyze the constituents of his particular situation and then consider what changes he might introduce in order to produce, in Dewey’s parlance, a “consummatory” end. Such an end is a fulfillment of these particular conditions, and it is unique to them. Similarly, there is no such thing as an absolute good against which actions may be evaluated; rather, any constructed end that promotes human flourishing while taking into account the precarious is a good.

Dewey joined and gave direction to American pragmatism, which was initiated by the logician and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce in the mid-19th century and continued into the early 20th century by William James, among other thinkers. Anticipating Dewey, James regarded reality as an array of “buzzing” rather than static data, and he argued that the distinction between mental experience and the physical world is “messy” rather than pristine. Another theme of early pragmatism, also adopted by Dewey, was the importance of experimental inquiry. Peirce, for example, praised the scientific method’s openness to repeated testing and revision of hypotheses, and he warned against treating any idea as an infallible reflection of reality. In general, pragmatists were inspired by the dramatic advances in science and technology during the 19th century—indeed, many had formal scientific training and performed experiments in the natural, physical, or social sciences.

Dewey’s particular version of pragmatism, which he called “instrumentalism,” is the view that knowledge results from the discernment of correlations between events, or processes of change. Inquiry requires an active participation in such processes: the inquirer introduces specific variations in them to determine what differences thereby occur in related processes and measures how a given event changes in relation to variations in associated events. For example, experimental inquiry may seek to discern how malignancies in a human organism change in relation to variations in specific forms of treatment, or how students become better learners when exposed to particular methods of instruction.

True to the name he gave it, and in keeping with earlier pragmatists, Dewey held that ideas are instruments, or tools, that humans use to make greater sense of the world. Specifically, ideas are plans of action and predictors of future events. A person possesses an idea when he is prepared to use a given object in a manner that will produce a predictable result. Thus, a person has an idea of a hammer when he is prepared to use such an object to drive nails into wood. An idea in the science of medicine may predict that the introduction of a certain vaccine will prevent the onset of future maladies of a definite sort. Ideas predict that the undertaking of a definite line of conduct in specified conditions will produce a determinate result. Of course, ideas might be mistaken. They must be tested experimentally to see whether their predictions are borne out. Experimentation itself is fallible, but the chance for error is mitigated by further, more rigorous inquiry. Instrumentalism’s operating premise is that ideas empower people to direct natural events, including social processes and institutions, toward human benefit.

Given its emphasis on the revisability of ideas, the flux of nature, and the construction of ends or goods, one may wonder how Dewey’s philosophy could provide moral criteria by which purported goods may be evaluated. Dewey did not provide a thorough, systematic response to the question of how an instrumentalist determines the difference between good and evil. His typical rejoinder was that human fulfillment will be far more widespread when people fully realize that precarious natural events may come under deliberate human direction. Dewey made this claim, however, without sufficiently weighing the problem of how people are to choose between one proposed vision of fulfillment and another, especially when there are honest disagreements about their respective merits. Yet, while he never solved the problem, Dewey did address it in his philosophy of democracy, which he referred to as “democracy as a way of life.”

Dewey conceived of democracy as an active process of social planning and collective action in all spheres of common life. Democracy is also a source of moral values that may guide the establishment and evolution of social institutions that promote human flourishing. However, unlike other moral frameworks (e.g., great religious traditions or political ideologies), democracy as a way of life is neither absolutist nor relativistic, because its norms and procedures are fallible and experimental. It is a consciously collaborative process in which individuals consult with each other to identify and address their common problems; indeed, Dewey spoke of democracy as “social intelligence.” Within a fully democratic society, Dewey suggested, people would treat each other with respect and would demonstrate a willingness to revise their views while maintaining a commitment to cooperative action and experimental inquiry.